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Jeffco & CO Say "No" to inBloom

On Tuesday, November 7, 2013 the Jeffco Board of Education voted to sever all ties with inBloom. The vote was unexpected and it came on the heels of difficult news that Jeffco Superintendent Dr. Cynthia Stevenson would be resigning in June 2014. Please see news links below.

I thank each one of you for taking time to support our efforts. Without your petition signatures, your emails, your attending meetings, your spreading the word and your words of encouragement, we never would have had this enormous victory for student privacy.

Jeffco is an amazing school district and our strength comes, in part, from an engaged and active citizenry advocating for our students and teachers. As we move forward in the coming months, my hope is that we continue to hold our elected officials accountable to make decisions based on what is best for our students, not outside interests.

MORNING ED SCOOPLET: GATES-FUNDED DATABASE LOSES ANOTHER CLIENT: The giant student database known as inBloom, a $100 million initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, lost one of its last three customers Thursday when the school board in Jefferson County, Colo., abruptly voted to sever ties. InBloom launched earlier this year with nine partner states, but they’ve dropped out one by one, often citing parental concerns about student privacy. Jefferson County tried to assuage privacy fears with an opt-out provision [http://politico.pro/18BTW7h] for parents, but that didn’t fully quiet the protests. The idea of storing so much student information in a cloud-based database — including demographics, test scores, learning styles, accommodations for disabilities, and more — remained contentious.

--This week, Jefferson County voters elected three new school board members who all had expressed grave concerns about inBloom. The existing board didn’t wait for the turnover, voting on Thursday night to pull out of the project immediately. And Superintendent Cindy Stevenson, an ardent supporter of inBloom, announced that she’ll retire at the end of the school year. The remaining inBloom customers are Illinois and New York — but protests are rising there, too. New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has expressed concerns about inBloom and made clear that he believes parents should have the right to withhold their children’s data. It could lead to a showdown between de Blasio and Education Commissioner John King, with inBloom’s fate hanging in the balance.